The following interview is a conversation we had with Evan Kaplan, CEO of InfluxData, on our podcast Category Visionaries. You can view the full episode here: Over $170 Million Raised to Build the Leading Time Series Provider
Evan Kaplan
Hey, thanks, Brent. Thanks for having me.
Brett
Yeah, no problem. So I was doing my research before the interview, and I see that you started a company in 1996 that you eventually sold. So take me back to 1996. What was going on in your world?
Evan Kaplan
Oh my God. Doing your research. We should have hidden that research. So I have a very different background than most entrepreneurs and most other folks. I don’t have a computer science degree. I have an environmental science degree. I spent most of my formative years, my late 20s, climbing and skiing around the world, guiding, working for different organizations. So in my late twenty s, I joined an aerospace company, originally doing management training and development, which is very different. And that came from my guiding skills and working with groups and things like that. And after a year of that, I realized that I really wanted to be in the heart of the business. And I became a junior program manager doing flight computers, aerospace stuff, things like that for Boeing and Airbus. It’s really wonderful experience. Program management, 20 teams or 25, 30 engineers.
Evan Kaplan
A lot of responsibility at a relatively young age. And then what was great about that role is you’d have these big projects, big airframe projects, and then I’d be able to go and take off on these expeditions for two or three months. When one project was done, another project was done. But through that process, they eventually put me through business school. And then after business school, a friend of mine, a climbing budy, had started a software company in the early days of networking. So early days of TCP IP networking, when TCP IP was becoming the protocol that drove the Internet, and it was already into large enterprises. So I joined that company. The company grew from like 10 million to 100 and 4150 million while I was there.
Evan Kaplan
But I got to witness the beginning of the very early Internet, FTP, Telenet, the original browsers. And so in 96, I decided to start my own company, which was a security company built on the concept of SSL based vpns. And so I did that with a partner, my CTO and I, we started it, we raised $750,000. We couldn’t imagine how we would spend all of that money. But over the next four years, the company grew quite fast and were kind of a unicorn going into 2000. And then were working with bankers to go public and super excited and thought I was incredibly talented. I thought I was going to be incredibly wealthy and all the things that go with that. And then in 2000, latter half of 2000, the market crashed and we had 400 people burning a lot of money.
Evan Kaplan
We had real estate leases that anticipated growth and we had to correct and so cut it down to 120 people. It was brutal. And we eventually got it to work. We sold it off in parts and we sold. Eventually the business got sold to Sonicwall, which is part of Dell Corporation. And so we got, okay, we learned a lot. I would rather been lucky, but we learned a lot in the process. And so that period of time was super building. You know, actually it stayed exciting the whole time, but that was uniquely exciting for me. I was a first time CEO trying to figure out all this stuff, raising a lot of capital, working with venture capital, that sort of stuff.
Evan Kaplan
So that’s a long winded answer to get you to that first business, which was Abbott, which is now a successful product line, is part of Dale.
Brett
We like long winded answers. Those are the fun ones.
Evan Kaplan
Right now.
Brett
I’d love to ask a bit more about that. So what was it like just going through that experience for you of thinking that you have this IPO coming, you’re going to have big success, financial success, all this stuff, it sounds like you got very close and then it didn’t work out in the end. So take me back to inside your head. How are you coaching yourself through that? Because I think there’s a lot that can be learned from those types of painful experiences.
Evan Kaplan
So let’s just call these wisdom building experiences. And so it’s cliche, but it’s also true. You’re never as bad as you think you are. And you’re never as good as you think you are. Same with your business. Your business is never as good as you think it is. Magical. It’s never as bad as you think it is. So you want to have a sort of a tempered view and being a first time CEO, but tell you even to this day, if there’s ceos out there who don’t have the impostor syndrome, then I have to question their fundamental outlook on life, because these are tremendously responsible jobs, even at small companies, and you always feel a bit of an imposter.
Evan Kaplan
And so I was certainly feeling that during that period of time, the elevation, the altitude that were gaining felt like we worked hard, but it felt pretty high. And then the altitude we lost after it was over felt really low. But all through that, you have a fear of failure and an excitement for the opportunity. But I’m tied. But you also have this deep commitment to these people. And I don’t just mean the employees who are central to all this, but also to the investors. And you’ve made commitments to. And you just feel like your back is against the wall all the time, and you never put the ball down. And I think that comes with a bowl.
Brett
Now, I just finished reading a book about the climbers in Kyrgyzstan that was in, like the. Something like that where they got stuck there. I’ve ever heard this story. But they got taken hostage by Terrorists in Kyrgyzstan.
Evan Kaplan
Well, you’re talking about the dawn wall. Yeah, about Yosemite climb. Part of that is with his ex wife.
Brett
There’s a book on that.
Evan Kaplan
Did you see? There’s also, I believe, Netflix did a story of the dawn wall, which is amazing. That climb is the way they worked on that. It’s worth watching.
Brett
Yeah. And the reason I ask is you mentioned climbing. So let’s talk about some of your climbing. What’s the craziest experience you’ve ever had while climbing? Any experiences where death seemed close or you were flirting with death? Any cool stories that you can share from all that? Any terrorists?
Evan Kaplan
No terrorists, nothing like that. But lots of crazy kind of youthful stuff. We were climbing a peak in, I’m dating myself now in 87, right next to Kenjin Duca. It’s a 25,000 foot peak called Janu. It has a super long route. And I went with one of my closest friends and other folks, and were in some very hairy places and kicking off avalanches. And I was truly scared. I’ve been in places like that where I’ve been truly scared, but largely in control. That was a unique experience. Probably the scariest thing was actually very close to home. I was living in Seattle, and there was a peak called Mount Constance, and I went climbing with Founder of that software company that I talked to you about earlier. And were going super fast, and we’re coming down this cooler.
Evan Kaplan
It was spring, and I hit a patch of ice, and I took a spill, and I ended up falling about 1500ft down a very steep snow slope, and I have no memory of it. I had a big head concussion.
Brett
Wow.
Evan Kaplan
And must have been awake because there were very significant rock areas. So I must have steered myself through that, but I have no memory of it. And I put my ice axe through my knee, but that was arguably in my own backyard, so. Wow. Was the most hazardous thing that’s ever happened, climbing. But there’s a lot of. When you’re young, you do stupid stuff. There’s a lot of kind of. Now I look bad, and if my kids did, I might be terrified for.
Brett
Do you still actively climb then? And if so, are there any bucket list climbs you haven’t done yet that you’re still planning to try to do?
Evan Kaplan
Always bucket list climbs. So the answer is no. Nowadays, I have two teenagers, so they both have gone downward bound and hence part of that. But in every year on father’s day and my birthday, we have to do some sort of climbing here. But it’s generally something. It’s something that’s hard physically, but not hard subjectively hazardous.
Brett
Nice.
Evan Kaplan
So I’m happy to get out like that.
Brett
Yeah, you did it. Now you’ve moved on to.
Evan Kaplan
Yeah, I’m happy to just get out, although I still read a lot. Watch it.
Brett
Nice. Now, another couple of questions we like to ask, really, just to better understand what makes you tick. First one, what CEO or Founder do you admire the most, and what do.
Evan Kaplan
You admire about, know the standard answers are, you know, what they are, whether it’s Elon Musk or bezos or something like that. And I do really admire these guys who can build these multiple businesses on these platforms and these forces of nature. But probably, if I had to answer, I found the board of this nonprofit called one Heart worldwide, and the Founder is a nurse practitioner who had lived in Tibet and started doing these maternal health and building these remote hospitals up in the himalayas for people. And then when the Tibet uprisings happened in the early 2000s, she moved the whole operation to Nepal. And now we serve, I think, don’t hold me to this, 26 or 27 of the mountainous provinces in Nepal. I’ve gone over there after the earthquake.
Evan Kaplan
And so in terms of leadership, like, you start something from nothing, and then you have to restart it again from nothing, and then you build it and you raise money around the world, and you’re doing this amazing service around maternal health care with really amazing outcomes, and it’s not in the world of business, as we think about it, but it was an incredible feat, and I was super honored to work with her.
Brett
Yeah. Those are the types of leaders that we love to hear about with these questions. It’s like bezos and musk. It’s like, of course, we all going to admire them, right? It’s like a no brainer. So I always like hearing those others that aren’t maybe on the radar as much as them, but there’s just so much you can learn.
Evan Kaplan
Yeah. Taking nothing away from those personalities, whether jobs or bezos or like. But this is a very different know, and frankly, consistent with my reading and stuff. I’m not that interested in the business stories. I’m interested in the human stories.
Brett
On the topic of books, let’s go there. So I stole this from someone else, but they call it a quake book. So it’s a book that just, like, rocks your core and changes how you view the world. Do any quickbooks come to mind for you? And books that really just influenced how you think about the world? For sure.
Evan Kaplan
There are books I love, and then I like that term, great books. In 2000, when everything was falling apart and everything we had built and all these people. A friend of mine gave me, literally, the book when things fall apart by Pima Chodra, and she’s a buddhist nun and she’s written a number of books. But that book particularly was super relevant and grounding for me was probably one of the toughest times in my life. And I still go back to it. I reread it every three or four years. It’s a description. We’re both in the tech world. It’s a description about, like, the world is just happening all the time, and any illusion of control that you control what’s happening is just that, an illusion. And so how do you work with it when things really fall apart?
Evan Kaplan
And that’s just a powerful book worth reading.
Brett
Nice.
Evan Kaplan
But I love climbing books. I read a lot of science fiction stuff, too, so that’s a broad base.
Brett
Have you heard of the river of doubt, the book?
Evan Kaplan
Yeah, I read that. Yeah, it’s quite good. Just finished that resident of the United States, he was doing that sort of stuff.
Brett
Yeah, pretty insane. I think. That’s, like, my favorite adventure book. I’ve been getting very into adventure books lately, and I finished that, like, a month ago. And that’s a fun read. I tend to enjoy those more than, like, business books. Now. Business books just, they get a little bit boring after a while.
Evan Kaplan
They do the river of doubt. That’s fascinating. So if you like adventure books, you must have read. It’s the, you know, another book that’s actually timely. That’s worth reading. Is called the West Ridge by Tom Hornbine, who just died two weeks ago. It’s the original american expedition to Everest. And most of the expedition went up what’s called now the south call route, which they called it the milk run. It’s the most common way up. It had been done before a couple of multiple times before the Americans got there. But Willie unsold and Tom Formbine did the west ridge, which still isn’t repeated very often, and they bivied 28,000ft. Willie lost his toes. It’s a great story. Anyway, I digress. You can cut this out.
Brett
I’ll leave it there and I’ll check that out.
Evan Kaplan
That’s the type of stuff we just. Because he died a couple of weeks ago.
Brett
Nice. All right, adding that to the list after the interview is done. Now, let’s talk a bit about InfluxData. So, for those who aren’t familiar, can you just tell us a bit about what the company does and what the product suite includes?
Evan Kaplan
Yeah, for just. I want to say we. My partner is Paul Dix. Paul founded the company. It’s probably worth talking about how we met. I was working at Trinity Ventures as an executive in residence. Paul and I met. We’re both CrossFitters, which is, if you’ve never met anybody at CrossFit, they’ll tell you in the first three minutes that they crossFit.
Brett
I was going to say you didn’t tell us at the start of this interview.
Evan Kaplan
And so we bonded around that stuff, which was great. And then we connected, because I had started my own company and run it and got it through the process. So I had a sense of what this emotional journey was like. And so we connected around that stuff. And so Paul had this vision. He had worked on Wall street, he built time series databases, which is what we do is really work with metrics and events at scale. And he had built for a number of wall street firms on top of other databases, like postgres or cassandra. And he just realized it was what he would call as a bit of a yacht shape, which is basically, you have to do a ton of work just to do a ton of work.
Evan Kaplan
And everybody else, everybody’s repeating the wheel time and time, know they’re doing the same thing over. And he was very involved in the open source community. He was deeply committed to. He ran the machine learning meetup in New York. He was just deeply committed to the whole open source thing. And he and a friend of his started influx going through y combinator and they built a time series database, and their idea was to build all the capability to handle these metrics and events at scale. And his first thought was some of this observability stuff that’s happening out there. But the broader thought for me was Iot. And so they built it, and they built it for developers. So it’s schema list, it’s super easy to use. It now is the largest time series platform, or metrics and offense platform in the world by far.
Evan Kaplan
It’s got a huge open source community. It’s got the most GitHub stars within DB engines. It’s larger than the next eight combined. And so it’s just of a size. Because of his vision about this category, as developers didn’t want to build this stuff from scratch, they could start with a database that was built for this, which is what’s happening in the database world. You have these specialty databases, and so we’ve got this tremendous open source community that we’ve built around, and that’s what’s allowed us to raise the money and build the business in terms of what we do. Just to be more specific, and I’ll be out here, is there two areas that we specialize? Basically it’s the instrumentation of systems. So if you can imagine, Iot is the easy one to understand. So you’ve got sensors all over the world.
Evan Kaplan
The world’s getting increasingly sensified. Healthcare, cars, transportation, industrial, energy, and all those sensors, they speak this language called time series. Right. Pressure, volume, humidity, temperature, moisture over time. A measurement of measurement. Right. And so we’re really good at collecting and ingesting that at scale, at compressing that data. So it’s available for long periods of time at summarizing it, so you don’t need to keep all of it forever. But most importantly, querying it in real time. And so particularly with AI coming on, querying in real time is really important. So the leading edge of data, you want responses in milliseconds. I’m collecting data and I want to query it within a millisecond. That’s what the database is really good at. The other side is your instrument, software itself. So that’s observability.
Evan Kaplan
So anything that runs in software, network, telemetry, crypto, blockchain, lots of customers in all those areas.
Brett
Just so we can understand the scale that you’re operating at. Are there any numbers you can share just in terms of customer size or a community size and growth? Any numbers that you can share, just so we can try to comprehend the scale that you’re operating at today?
Evan Kaplan
Yeah, sure. We have 1900 customers. A very simple open source version of influx on standard hardware can handle a couple of million points per second. When we cluster them and scale them together, you can handle billions and billions of points a second. Writing from hundreds of thousands. Know all the Tesla powerwalls, the battery packs, lucid cars, Salesforce’s APIs with Mulesoft reporting like anything that’s happening at scale, whether it’s in software or hardware, and you’re collecting on time, super important. The thesis here is really simple, which is we want our systems to be smarter and smarter, but we want them to be, at a minimum, correctable. Then you want them self healing, and then you want them autonomous. Well, it turns out every stage of that journey is about instrumentation over time. So take a self driving car.
Evan Kaplan
You say a self driving car is you instrument the car itself. You let it drive for a little while, you correct for anomalies, you let it drive while you correct from your anomaly. You then instrument it some more. And that journey, if you do it 45 billion times, you’ll get a self driving car, right? But if you do it ten times, you get a better operating observability system, you maybe get a better home thermostat. Like, there’s just a variety, but the whole thing is driven by this instrumentations and measurements. So these companies have emerged, and we’re not the only ones who are really good at data, collecting data at scale, which drives these intelligent systems. So that’s a good way to think about it. We want increasingly intelligent systems, and it all starts with instrumentation.
Brett
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Brett
What are some of the challenges that you have to constantly navigate, or maybe more in the early days that you had to navigate because you were open source?
Evan Kaplan
Yeah, I mean, the classic open source is, and since I joined Paul in 2016, the database, I think its first commits were 2000 and early 2014, but I joined Paul in 2016. The classic, the headline during that period of time where the only people who ever made money in open source was red hat. That was before Mongo. Mongo probably had a flat round at that time, Couchbase maybe had a down round. Elastic really didn’t even exist at any scale. There was no confluent, there weren’t these successful open source companies to look at. And the primary issue was people were selling support. We build something on your open source stuff and you’d support it. And if you’re a big enough company, after a while you didn’t need the vendor, you could just support yourself. The source code there.
Evan Kaplan
And so we took the model to build what’s called open core, which is the open source is free, it’s completely useful, but once you get up to a certain scale, you have to buy our closed source software. So the trick for all the open source companies is how do you effectively monetize these very large communities you build? You don’t owe me the exact numbers, but you’re a phenomenal open source company if you could monetize 1% of your community.
Brett
Wow.
Evan Kaplan
Because there are so many hobbyists and casual users, and people who figure out lots of large companies use influx without paying us any. Now it’s our job to continue to add value, so they’ll pay us. So we offer the product, we offer it in a serverless form in the cloud, so people can just pay you. Go serve. We offer a dedicated form in the cloud, and then we offer it on prem, so we offer it all three ways, and there’s a lot of value built between closed plus and open source, and that’s what’s gotten us these 1900 customers. But the challenge is always what do you do for the community, and then what do you do to monetize the business? And striking that balance is really important.
Brett
Are there any specific features you can think of or things that you can think of where you had to make hard decisions? And maybe they were heavily debated internally if it should be part of the open source version or the paid version.
Evan Kaplan
When I joined in 2016, we had to raise that first real series b, and we had planned on keeping the clustering and the high availability in the open source, so that would make even a larger community, because that would be super powerful in the open source. But were faced with kind of an existential threat as we couldn’t keep funding the company and building the database if we didn’t find a way to monetize. And so it was by March of that year, Paul and I went through this incredible process with us, our investors. I talked to 15 different open source ceos, and we made the decision to bring clustering into the closed source and not make it available in the open source.
Evan Kaplan
And if you go back to hacker news at that, know, the open source community can know it’s great, but people could be very hacker news at that time. Paul was taking so many shots over the bow for that decision. It was the right decision for us as a company. But it’s a tricky thing to navigate. But your answer is right, it’s a tricky thing to navigate.
Brett
And something else that I picked up on, as you were explaining what the company does, is that you’re a very effective communicator. I’m a nontechnical person, and how you explain the product was very clear, very simple, very straightforward. And I think that’s something that a lot of companies struggle with, is how do you explain a technical product in easy terms? Have you always been that effective at communicating, or was this a skill that you had to really nurture and develop over the course of your career?
Evan Kaplan
So, in order to answer your question, I have to buy into the assumption that I’m effective at communicating. My wife and kids might disagree a little bit, but the answer is, I will take some credit. So, I think partly because I’m not aee, and at a young age, I was managing double e’s and software engineers, or at least had to know. I think I’m good at conceptually understanding how stuff works, right? And so I’m not a coder per se, but I’m conceptually good at understanding how stuff works. And so it’s like in medical school, you’re forced under the pressure of see one, do one, teach one, which is you see a surgery, you do a surgery, then you teach somebody else a surgery in the course of a relatively small period of time.
Evan Kaplan
There’s a little bit of that I can learn almost anything if I can sit in front of a whiteboard with a good engineer. I think what makes Paul and I really great partners, and my former ctos really great partners, is I love being in front of whiteboards. I kind of hate powerpoints, although I use them extensively. But I like whiteboards, and I like people explaining. I like to be able to ask unfettered questions, sort of like you do in podcast, blow your interest. And that makes me better, because once I understand it, then I could be like, I can teach.
Brett
That makes a lot of sense and that’s super helpful to hear. Now let’s talk a little bit about growth and I guess really what you got right. So 1900 customers. Obviously this is a lot of different companies in this space. There’s a lot of noise in this space. What do you think you got right there in the early days to really break through all that noise and to win in the way that you have won? I’m sure there’s a long list of things you got right, but what would be some of those top things that come to mind?
Evan Kaplan
So funny. It’s so easy for me to think about the things I got wrong. The things I got right. I don’t discount those. Right? What? And it’s not me. I think what Paul got right with the original build was he took a chapter out of Mongo’s playbook, who did really great at this. And the former CEO of Mongo’s on our board is a good friend. And what Mongo got right was in a world where Oracle and postgres were the standard, they figured out something, a document database that was really easy to use, super easy for developers to work with in the beginning, not that reliable, but over time became very reliable, and they figured out how to really engage developers early in that.
Evan Kaplan
And what Paul got right completely was that approach to the time series category by making it schema list, by building the capabilities directly in, by allowing it to scale horizontally. Just a bunch of stuff that made it really easy for developers to engage quickly, learn, install. So the hurdle that you see with most databases, whether it’s traditional mysql or postgres, of coming over, having to get over a big wall just to use it, didn’t exist with it. It was very easy to start working with, and then it was pretty easy to stay working, which was the real benefit of it. And that’s been our calling card, the concept we call time to. Awesome. How quickly can a developer feel like they’re useful and developers, where it all starts for us.
Evan Kaplan
For me, talking to a CIO is an exercise in vanity, because you don’t go to a CIO and say, hey, listen, you need a new time sharing, right? You start with a developer, you win an architecture, and then you explain to a CIO or CTO why this is important, why it will scale with their business, why it actually creates competitive advantage.
Brett
And you mentioned there are things that you got wrong. What’s like the biggest thing you got wrong?
Evan Kaplan
Would you say I got so many things wrong, man. I think we intellectual, honestly, we pivoted the company. We believe, obviously, and I think we’re correct, is the cloud was going to be the primary way people were going to consume these databases. And so it was really important that we got there. And so went to a Kubernetes backbone and a serverless and we built on that and it took a lot of our resources. We probably didn’t invest as much time in the open source as we could have during that period. And so consequentially, our monetized enterprise customers didn’t grow as fast as our cloud customers. But now in our world, we realize, particularly in IoT, that it’s almost always a three tier architecture in which there’s something local at the edge and then there’s something in the cloud.
Evan Kaplan
We could have invested more on those, on prem deployments, in those enterprise deployments during those period of years. We’re now correcting for that really strongly. We have a new release out, our three old version, which we’re incredibly excited about. But yeah, if I could take it back, I would have done stuff a little bit differently. I probably would have supported SQL earlier. We didn’t bort native SQL, we supported a variant of SQL. I probably would have supported that earlier. So these are things we would have done. But if you ask us, there are hundreds of things we should have done. I want to air out all of our dirty laundry.
Brett
We’ll save that for part two of the podcast. Four hour episode.
Evan Kaplan
By the way, my philosophy after my three long stints as a CEO is if you can get 60 65% of the stuff you’re doing right, you’re going to have an amazing company.
Brett
I like that. How do you make decisions like that to ensure that you’re at that type of rate of 60 70%? Are there things that you do to try to really optimize decision making to support that goal? Or what do you do just behind the scenes when it comes to making big decisions?
Evan Kaplan
Yeah, it’s not enough to just make the right decision. Most important thing you do is enroll everybody in the decision process as much as possible. And for the most part, I think we do that pretty well, which is if I have to tell somebody to do something, I’ve already lost. So my view is I have to enroll people in whatever we’re doing, whatever big change, whatever pivot, whatever dynamic we’re doing. In order to enroll people, you have to let people is a terrible way. I said you have to let people own it a little bit. So like your dog in your yard, they have to be able to pee on the corners. They have to be able to say, yeah, I can see the edges of this problem. I can see how you thought about it, I can understand how you’re conceptualizing it.
Evan Kaplan
I’m in agreement. And in the rare case you’ll get the Caslic Amazon thing, which is you agree to disagree, but you commit. And so there’s the process of selling, there’s the process and they’re related. The process of enrolling people is also the process of analyzing the problem. So if you can do that with a core group of committed constituents owners, that’s how you make the best decision. That’s how you get 65 or 70%, still don’t get 100% because the world’s doing its thing around you, but you maximize your chance of both making the best decision and then executing reasonably on it. Because it’s one thing to make a decision, I’d like to be in the AI business, it’s another thing to then say I’m executing to be in that business.
Brett
And if we look at the organization, how many people are employed today full time?
Evan Kaplan
Roughly, we’re like 175 or something.
Brett
And is this all in office? So is everyone here in Silicon Valley or is it distributed tv?
Evan Kaplan
No, it’s not. So from the beginning, and this is a learning for me, from the beginning, were probably 70, 65, 70% remote. Because of the open source background, we hired developers, particularly wherever they live and wherever they work. And so we’re always a remote first company. We had an office in San Francisco that was pretty significant. And were about to sign for the classic three more floors at 799 market. And then Covid hit. And obviously went all remote for a little while and then it was pretty easy to stay. All. I miss some of, I really do miss some. So now we have some places where we convene and we’re more aggressive about convening around the world, but we’re remote first and now a remote primary.
Brett
And let’s talk a little bit about how important do you think it is to be in Silicon Valley. If you’re a startup Founder today, if you were starting a company today and you were say, maybe you’re 22 years old and you could choose to go anywhere in the world, would you go to Silicon Valley or where would you go?
Evan Kaplan
So I’m going to answer with a double negative, which is, it’s not important. What I mean by that is I came from Seattle. Most of my career was in Seattle. I moved here to run a public company in 2009, and Seattle had a very rich community. Austin has a really rich community, Boston and then other places and that sort of stuff. But it is just after having lived here now for 14 years and raised now, my teenagers here, there’s such a strong network of information capital innovation that it’s hard, it’s duplicated other places, and so you can definitely. I started a business in Seattle and was successful with that business, but I would say you have some advantage being here. At least the whole company doesn’t have to be here, but there’s some advantage being here.
Evan Kaplan
People have seen the movie so many times here to meet somebody who’s been through four different episodes and learn something from each episode. Right. A little harder in other places. A little bit harder. So I’m not saying it’s definitively important, but I’m saying it’s pretty nice.
Brett
One thing I’ve been just mind blown about here in San Francisco and Silicon Valley in general is the density and the volume. Just the number of people around who have done this before. I’ve never seen anything like that, and I’m sure Austin does have some of that. But if you’re just looking at volume and density, it’s just insane the amount of founders who are here building stuff, vcs, executives who’ve done it. It’s just, there’s no.
Evan Kaplan
I don’t feel like, listen, there’s no expertise that I would want to learn from, and I’m pretty active about seeking mentors or different other folks who know stuff. I don’t know. There’s no expertise that I would feel like I have to look outside of Silicon Valley to find, at least in the world, know growing tech businesses.
Brett
Is there a specific skill that you’re trying to really focus on developing and improving? Like, do you have a mentor that you’re working with for something very specific, anything like that you could share?
Evan Kaplan
I work with an executive coach. It’s the first time, and this is late in my career. And Covid was one of the things that I started feeling pretty isolated just working out of my house all the time. And so I work with an executive coach who sort of helps me on that. And I would recommend that to other ceos. There’s not any one particular skill. I think it’s just having somebody. What happens in the CEO role? As I said earlier, you’re carrying the ball all the time. On weekends, nights, you never really put the ball down, and so you’re always thinking about it.
Evan Kaplan
And so it’s really nice for ceos to have somebody to dialogue with who’s not on their team, not on their board, not a customer you can dialogue with all those people have rich discussion, but it’s really nice to have something. So mostly I just use it is to be able to think out loud. I have a couple of board members who I do that well, really well with, and that just on their side that you can do that with. But it’s not a particular skill at this point in my career. It’s more just the ability to sort of think out loud with people in a safe environment.
Brett
And now you’re something like seven years into this journey. What motivates you day to day? And do you ever have days where you struggle with motivation? Or are you just ready every single day to wake up and run through walls?
Evan Kaplan
Yeah, of course you have days that struggle with motivation. I like to say I don’t think I’m particularly smart, I don’t think I’m particularly gifted, but maybe it’s my climbing background, but I’m pretty resentless. I know how to get off and work every day. I know how to do the hard things. I’m comfortable doing hard things. I think that is the natural skill that I bring to the table. And so I find a way through it. I find a way through it. I have a great partnership with our Founder, Paul, and we’re connected to each other. And so when one of us is in the verbial shitter, the other one like, oh, no, look at this side of it.
Evan Kaplan
So, yeah, it’s a, you know, people like to talk about all the glory of all this stuff, and the glory is great, but it’s a journey.
Brett
In that journey, have there been any near death experiences at the company or anything you can share where it got close, or would that have been more of the early days before you came in? Because you came in, I think was what, four years into the journey? Did that happen? Maybe before.
Evan Kaplan
No. I have near death experiences in business. The one I described to you in 2000 was we had $10 million swept from our cash account by Silicon Valley bank, right at the edge of the bubble. I definitely had near death experiences, but not on influx. It’s not always been easy. Every year has not been as good as. Some years are good, some years are bad or not as good, but no, never had. We have a very strong investor group of tier one capital providers, a really sharp board, a talented exec team. I feel very lucky.
Brett
And if we look at your journey here, journey at other companies, and really just career in general based on all of that. If someone were starting a company today, let’s say one of your children, they said, dan, I’m going to be a Founder. I’m going to start an enterprise b, two b tech company. What’s the number one piece of tactical advice that you would share? So not advice like, oh, work hard, be relentless. What’s something very tactical that you would advise them to do and think about?
Evan Kaplan
So I’ll answer it with a little bit of background. When I started my first company, I started because I was tired of, and I think entrepreneurs, most entrepreneurs feel this way. I had a unique point of view about a particular problem, that’s for sure. And I think you always have to have that if you’re going to be a successful entrepreneur. In our case, Paul had that unique point of view since I came in a little bit later. But I really, culturally, what I wanted for myself is I was tired to fitting into other people’s know, you spend a certain amount when you work for a company figuring out how to fit into other people’s culture, right. And I would say you use up some of your creativity and some of energy just in that fitting process. Right. It’s normal. It’s fine.
Evan Kaplan
It’s not a big deal. But for me, I got kind of tired of that. And so I was like, I want to start a company so that I don’t have to fit in, because I’d be the CEO, I’d be the culture. I wouldn’t have any boss. Well, that was pretty naive, because what ends up is you have, like, 200 bosses, you don’t have one. Right. And the culture you build, you still have to fit it to that. And you don’t go by yourself. You build that collectively with a group of employees. It’s not like this is the way it’s going to be. Write it on the dorm room poster and publish it more. Like, collectively, what is it? And so we did our first values as a company. It was a collective process. Right. And I have to fit into that.
Evan Kaplan
I have to that culture. So what I would say to turn around as an advice is, don’t start a company just because you want to be your own boss. Start a company because you’re ready for the journey. The journey is incredibly honorable. It’s incredibly rich, it’s incredibly fulfilling. But it’s brutal. Can be brutal. Right? That’s the first thing I’d say, is, do it for the journey. The second thing I say is, if you don’t think you’re a salesperson, you’re wrong. 97% of your job is, I like to say, enrolling, but it’s selling. Selling customers, selling employees, and selling investors. 3% is some sort of brilliance about strategy, unless you get comfortable. So, ironically, I’d want. If it was one of my kids, I’d want them to have some sales experience. If they were an engineer, I’d want them to have been an se?
Evan Kaplan
Or some at the customer cold face. I want them to learn to be good communicators and engaging people.
Brett
And final question, since I know we’re up on time here, what’s next in this journey? What’s next three to five years going to look like for you?
Evan Kaplan
I think we have something special. Know it takes a special relationship for a CEO to come in with a Founder. And Paul and I have built that kind of relationship. We have a group of people who know I get inspired by the people I work with. Some days when I feel that down, I’m like, I’m seeing this other person do something that was amazing, and I’m like, I’m inspired by it. And so I feel like we’ve got this really great foundation. I feel like the opportunity is really large. Even in these tougher markets, we’re not using less data. The AI stuff is very real. It’s starting to happen. We’re a market leader in this space.
Evan Kaplan
And so at this point in the game, I care less about the glory, but I care more about delivering as a steward for my investors, my employees, my customers. And so I’m truly motivated by that.
Brett
Amazing. I love it. All right, well, we are up on time, or we’re over on time here, so I won’t hold you any longer. But this has been so much fun. If people want to follow along with your journey as you continue to build, where should they go?
Evan Kaplan
Well, aren’t we doing this every week for the next 25 weeks?
Brett
Yeah, it’s true. Just tune in next week.
Evan Kaplan
It’s influxdata.com.
Brett
Amazing. And thank you so much for taking the time to chat and share the lessons that you’ve learned along the way and really just have an awesome, fun conversation. I really enjoyed this conversation, and I know our audience is going to as well. So thanks so much for taking the time. I really appreciate it.
Evan Kaplan
Thanks, Brett. I really appreciate it.
Brett
All right, give it Dutch. This episode of Category Visionaries is brought to you by Front Lines Media, Silicon Valley’s leading podcast production studio. If you’re a B2B Founder looking for help launching and growing your own podcast, visit frontlines.io podcast and for the latest episode, search for Category Visionaries on your podcast platform of choice. Thanks for listening and we’ll catch you on the next episode.
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